Deer Creek Falls - Grand Canyon GigaView

Description

"August 23, 1869. Just after dinner we pass a stream on the right, which leaps into the Colorado by a direct fall of more than 100 feet, forming a beautiful cascade. On the rocks in the cavelike chamber are ferns, with delicate fronds and enameled stalks." John Wesley Powell

Deer Creek is a spring-fed stream that flows through the western Grand Canyon to the Colorado River. The series of springs provide a continuous base flow to Deer Creek, making it a vital water source for wildlife. During periods of intense rainfall, Deer Creek can experience severe flash flooding. In the final half mile above the Colorado River, Deer Creek flows through a narrow slot canyon before plunging over a 150 feet (46 m) waterfall named Deer Creek Falls.

You are standing at the base of Deer Creek Falls just up from the Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Desert flowers are in full bloom and the Canyon benches glow with the fragile green of a wet spring.

Deer Creek and its waterfall are a popular stopping point for river trips through the Grand Canyon. Here, a couple on a commercial rafting trip enjoy some time alone with the roaring falls. Backpackers also enjoy the hike from the North Rim into the area. The Surprise Valley trail connects the Deer Creek Drainage with the adjacent Thunder River/Tapeats Creek drainage.

This image has sat on various hard drives for over a year since it was captured on an 18 day private river trip in April 2010. It was my only attempt to go bigger than my standard 360 pano. Instead of setting up to shoot 126 individual photos to cover the full sphere of view, I set this one up for over 600 photos. It took well over an hour and was plagued by both memory & battery issues. At one point, I failed to reset the zoom the on my camera and finished the shoot at the wrong zoom setting, resulting in the upper third of the sphere being a lower resolution than the rest. The exposure is also a bit off. Technical difficulties aside, though, I am simply happy to be standing in this extraordinarily beautiful place once again.

Deer Creek Falls is the lost image of Grand Canyon GigaView, my not-for-profit project to create a gigapixel virtual tour of America's primier natural atraction. Grand Canyon GigaView, a series of 29 ultra-high resolution, 360 degree images, can be found in Google Earth or Bing Maps Photosynth MapApp, Photosynth.net & Gigapan.org, on the iPhone in both the Pixeet360 & the Photosynth App. It appears in Google Earth courtesy of 360Cities.net, where it can also be found & interacted with.

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Comments

Great job. Wondering if you could give me some advice...I have trouble getting the entire sky as you have here. It's nice to actually have a full 360 view without black edges somewhere. How do you do that?

thanks, msih. It looks to me like you've been shooting panoramas by hand and using ICE to stitch them? I would suggest a pano head, either nodal ninja or gigapan, for more precision. On my gigapan, I simply set the robot to be sure to capture the sky with some cross over in each. It will take 14 photos of the sky that ICE has to parse for the stitch. My 360s are usually 14x9, but this one is higher res at over 600 photos.